Child of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration and a Reconnaissance of Canadian Environmental History

Andrew Watson

This is the first post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with Active History.

In 2016, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke made the bold prediction that “the Great Acceleration will not last long. It need not and cannot.”¹ A decade later, there are signs that this companion (some same synonymous) phenomenon of the Anthropocene endures. As one example, the energy required to generate the electricity needed to power accelerated servers that carry out the computational work of artificial intelligence (AI) is the next surge of the Great Acceleration.² And as with so much else during the Great Acceleration, Canada seems poised to play an important role in the rapid rise in the use of AI.³

According to Steffen, et al., the term, the Great Acceleration, “aims to capture the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System.”⁴ By many measures, as a social, cultural, and political idea, as much a socioecological and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. As the planet shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch, Canada served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.⁵

The concept of the Great Acceleration, therefore, offers a potentially valuable framework for a reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history, and a better understanding the field within a broader global and planetary context. Several environmental historians have written synthesis overviews to provide coherence to the field.⁶ These early efforts to explain what is distinctive about Canadian environmental history will continue as scholars pursue new questions, sources, and innovative methods. What has been missing from these efforts, however, is a unifying theory or concept that researchers can apply, or work within, to investigate what helps the field hang together across time and space.

To what extent has Canadian environmental history been shaped by the changes of the Great Acceleration? How might (re)thinking about the Great Acceleration in the Canadian context help us better understand the country’s environmental history and its contributions to environmental history more broadly?

The Great Acceleration Trends, adapated from Steffen, et al. (2015). http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html

Steffen, et al. offer 24 indicators of the Great Acceleration, 12 global socioeconomic trends and 12 planetary Earth system trends (Figure 1). With perhaps the exception of shrimp aquaculture, all these indicators offer potentially fruitful avenues for Canadian environmental history since 1950, and a handful have already been explored in the scholarship.⁷ Yet, just as the rise of AI suggests new dimensions for measuring the continuation of the Great Acceleration, there are many, almost countless, ways to evaluate the phenomenon depending on time and place.

So, what other indicators might help Canadian historians better understand Canada’s role in, and experiences of, the Great Acceleration? How might attending to those indicators specific to northern North America help environmental historians develop new questions and uncover new insights about Canada’s past?

Historians of Canada’s Great Acceleration will necessarily find themselves branching out into interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary efforts. Identifying indicators of Canada’s Great Acceleration may not end up being as challenging as then figuring out how to find sources and develop methods to understand what they can tell us about the past. In many cases (e.g. Methane or Ocean Acidification), historians will need to collaborate with researchers in the hard sciences who have the expertise to collect samples and analyze soil and water chemistry, and who might be eager for interesting new questions to pursue. In other cases, understanding how the Great Acceleration has shaped Canadian history, or how Canadians have played important roles in giving form to certain aspects of the Great Acceleration, will require that environmental historians branch out into, and become deeply familiar with, several related subfields, including economic history, agricultural history, and the history of science and technology.

Delving into a clearer understanding of the Great Acceleration will also reveal that the full story simply cannot be sufficiently understood and explained by starting in 1950. The history of the phenomenon that emerges distinctly after the Second World War began much earlier. The ideas and practices that informed the Great Acceleration’s social relations, patterns of economic activity, and environmental transformations have histories that must be studied in the context of the Great Acceleration’s long tail. The part of the graphs that seem flat and unexciting contain very important histories. For these longer time frames of Canada’s Great Acceleration, historians will need to identify indicators that help reveal trends that predated the Great Acceleration and inform its broader temporal context.

So how might environmental historians periodize the country’s part in the Great Acceleration?

Putting the Great Acceleration into the context of its antecedent ideas and practices offers new insights into the value of the concept for understanding environmental history more broadly. For example, extending the scope for Canada’s Great Acceleration back to the period between 1914 and 1945 can reveal how many of the most important socioeconomic and Earth system trends emerged as a result of both the immense and coordinated efforts by the state and private corporations to mobilize human and natural resources towards war efforts, as well as a growing demand for a higher standard of living from a broad segment of the population. If the origins of Canada’s Great Acceleration are extended back to Confederation in 1867, it becomes apparent that its foundations rest on the pursuit of resources, territorial expansion, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples that formed the origins of Canada as a project of liberal order.⁸ Pulling the frame even further back to the Conquest of New France and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 demonstrates that settler colonialism and monopoly corporate control over trade set down patterns that informed the creation of social, political, and economic life in northern North America for the next 250 years. And as scholars studying BIPOC have been pointing out for some time, the Great Acceleration and its companion, the Anthropocene, have only just begun to make white and settler scholars aware of monumental changes to the world that people of colour have felt acutely in North America since the start of the sixteenth century.⁹

The challenge and opportunity presented by the concept of the Great Acceleration is not only temporal, but geographic and place based as well. Undoubtedly, the sites for, and sources of, evidence for Canada’s Great Acceleration have emerged most clearly in urban and industrialized places, particularly cities and locations of large-scale resource extraction and processing. But as the indicators of the Great Acceleration suggest, the scale of changes that have unfolded since the mid-twentieth century make it clear that nearly every part of northern North America is either implicated or impacted. Thinking about where Canada’s Great Acceleration unfolded, and attending to how place shaped its particular indicators, reveals both the significant contributions that Canadian environmental history has to offer this framework, as well as the important gaps within the historiography that require further study. Canada’s enormous geography gives it an odd spatial scope of analysis; the framework of the Great Acceleration can help provide some coherence. Indeed, as a twined global and planetary concept, the Great Acceleration necessarily pulls Canadian environmental history outside its peculiar national borders to demonstrate how what unfolded in Canada was always part of broader trends happening in places at continental, hemispheric, oceanic, atmospheric, and whole world scales. Canada’s Great Acceleration obliges environmental historians to extend what makes Canada distinct to what it shared and contributed historically.

For more roughly thirty years, environmental historians have been helping to shape new ways of understanding Canadian history, and Canadian historians have been at the forefront of helping to advance the field of environmental history. What makes Canadian environmental history hang together beyond the existence of a nation-state? Perhaps a concept that could reasonably be applied to many other countries in the world is not what will help Canadian environmental historians determine the answer. But as the Great Acceleration inevitably draws to a close in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, perhaps it is worthwhile to consider whether its interdisciplinary methods, long analytical tail, and vast geographic scope offers something of value to Canadian environmental historians.

Andrew Watson is the Director of NiCHE and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. His current research includes commodities and urban metabolism in Toronto between the mid 19th and mid 20th centuries; and a study of the relationship between liberalism and fossil fuel energy in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. His first book, Making Muskoka: Tourism, Rural Identity, and Sustainability, 1870-1920, was published in 2022 with UBC Press.

1. J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2016): 209.
2.  “Energy demand from AI,” Internation Energy Association (2025). Last accessed April 30, 2026.
3. Canada has a federal Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and new data centres are being planned in many places across the country, including Alberta and Saskatchewan.
4. Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review vol.2 (1): 82.
5. Alan MacEachern, “Canada’s Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” The Otter. January 24, 2018; Sean Kheraj, “Culpability and Canada’s Anthropocene: A Response.” The Otter. January 29, 2018; F.M. McCarthy, et al., ”The Varved Succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a Candidate Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene Series.” The Anthropocene Review, 10,1 (2023): 146-176.
6.  Neil S. Forkey, Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century. University of Toronto, 2012; Laurel Sefton Macdowell, An Environmental History of Canada. UBC Press, 2012; James Murton, Canadians and their Natural Environment. Oxford University Press, 2021.
7. For Primary Energy Use see Richard W. Unger and John Thistle, Energy Consumption in Canada in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Instituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, 2013; R.W. Sandwell, ed. Powering Up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy From 1600. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. For Large Dams see Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River. Cambridge University Press, 2004; Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, “An Environmental History of Progress: Damming the Peace and Columbia Rivers,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no.3 (September 2011): 399-427; Caroline Desbiens, Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec. UBC Press, 2013; Brittany Luby, Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishnaabe Territory. University of Manitoba Press, 2020; Daniel Macfarlane, Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall. UBC Press, 2020. For Paper Production see Mark Kuhlberg, In the Power of the Government: The Rise and Fall of Newsprint in Ontario, 1894-1932. University of Toronto Press, 2015. For Marine Fish Capture see Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. UBC Press, 2010; David Banoub, Fishing Measures: A Critique of Desk-Bound Reason. Memorial University Press, 2021. For Domesticated Land see Jame Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia. UBC Press, 2007; Shannon Stunden Bower, Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba. UBC Press, 2011; Peter A. Russell, How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012; Joshua MacFadyen, Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil That Covered a Continent. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018; Shannon Stunden Bower, Transforming the Prairies: Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada UBC Press, 2024.
8. Ian Mckay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” The Canadian Historical Review, vol.81, no.4 (2000): 617-645.
9. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol.16, no.4 (2017): 761–780; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.